Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it :) Hope you have a fun but safe Halloween !October has been crazy, and busy so crazy busy but I still got a lot of books in. I just need to find the time and motivation to get the reviews up in time, most the time anyway.

One exciting thing happened, I was offered the ARC for Summoned to Thirteenth Grave the last book in the Charley Davidson Seriesfor a book tour. It was soo, sooo good and I can't wait to share my thoughts with all of you soon ;)

Other than that I got my ARCs done for the month and now just have two left that are not due until next year,so I got time :D The Halloween Giveaway is still open until Oct 31 at midnight, so make sure to enter it for a chance to win some money and or some awesome book prizes and or swag. I will add the copter down below again for you.

November Goals? None really, just finish Kingdom of Ash and just knock some books of my never ending TBR. I think I will do that for the rest of the year, you know all two months that are left

When Lando Calrissian gets caught smuggling on the planet Hynestia, the queen agrees to let him go if he delivers something called the Solstice Globe to the Empire on her behalf. Lando is relieved that his punishment is a simple delivery mission-but he soon discovers things are not as simple as they seem. The queen's daughter, Princess Rinetta, has stowed away on the Millennium Falcon and demands Lando and L3-37 take the globe back to its home planet, which needs the globe to survive. Now Lando has to choose: Do what's right, or do what's best for Lando. But if he's lucky enough, he just might be able to do both....

*I received a free copy from the publisher and chose to leave a voluntary review. Thank you!*

I love Star Wars and the Star Wars universe. I'm not a mega fan like some people but I still like it and enjoy it very much. It is something I share with my kids and family. So when this book came up for review I was excited. Since I read some excerpts from the book and liked them I was even more excited.

That being said... I really enjoyed it for the most part but towards the end it seemed to drag a bit. It almost seemed stuck. Which slowed down the book and the pace of it a bit.

Some of the characters came over flat especially if they were not main characters, but overall they were fun and easy to follow.

If you know Star wars you know the world and it was fun revisiting them.... the book also had some very awesome and fun illustration that I enjoyed.

The book is rather short (for me) with under 200 pages but that will make it the perfect size for some kids. But I think the book is pretty much for young and old if you enjoy Star Wars.

Behold! The second ever zombie book I didn’t hate! Well, I still hated the zombies themselves, but it turns out when you throw them in a story full of interesting characters, a snarky not-so-reliable narrator, a rich historical setting, and skillful applications of critical race theory, I don’t mind them so much. The real monsters in this book are the living. The undead are just victims of circumstance.

Today in Darth Pony’s Pendant Corner: I’ll never love present tense and I occasionally found it jarring here, but it wasn’t too obnoxious. That and a teensy bit of repetition were the only drawbacks for me. When the sequel comes out (which I think has been pushed back to 2020), I’ll be ignoring my zombie dislike once again and buying a copy.

I enjoyed and admired a lot of things about Dread Nation, but for some reason it didn't gel into a book that I would rave about the way all the positive professional reviews do. I found myself getting sidetracked with other books until I finally made up my mind to finish it, and when I did, I found the ending a little lacking. Strengths of the book include its core premise, backstory, setting, world-building, and protagonist. A Reconstruction-era, zombie-fighting, sickle-wielding WOC and her friends from combat school is an idea that I haven't seen before in any medium, and I was on board after the first few pages. Jane is fiery and clever and doesn't fit into the subservient little role that polite society wants ("society" being a long parade of authority figures). The antagonists are pretty convincing evil racists, who long for the "good old days" of slavery that are still in living memory and blaming the zombies on man's "mistake," the Civil War and emancipation. The humans are worse than the shamblers, and I'm still fine with that as a theme.

But when I got to the ending, it felt a little flat. Let me see if I can critique this without spoilers. The big emotional punch is a revelation about backstory. That's nice to tie together the ongoing correspondence we see that begins every chapter, but I feel like it's got to break some kind of writing rule. Why? I cared about what Jane was going to do in the present *because* of her backstory a lot more than new information about something she did long ago. On top of that, the protagonists get out of the mess they've been getting into in the last third of the book pretty easily, and within a few pages, shoop, there's setup for a sequel. I realize pretty much every genre fiction book these days sells with franchises in mind, no shame there, but I felt like it came at the expense of a satisfying climax. I might be interested in sequels, but unfortunately, it's a "might" for me instead of a "hoo-rah, yes." I hope the narratives of the series improve with the author's skill, because she's definitely got some, and I want to see where these characters and their world go. So... 3 out of 5.

As a black girl born in July of 1863, in the South no less, Jane McKeene did not have a promising future ahead of her. Her birth just so happened to coincide with the dead rising from the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville. The dead have plagued the United States ever since. A divided nation agreed on re-education acts that required black and native American children to be trained to put down the dead. Jane is in training to be an Attendant, a young woman set as a personal bodyguard for wealthy women.

I love this, because of course white people would make minorities do the dirty work. It makes a sick amount of sense. Ireland's vision of how 19th century society re-arranges itself around the constant threat of attacks from the dead was entertaining and sobering. This novel works as an action and adventure story, raises issues of social justice, and provides a few key perspectives on life in the 19th century.

'Dread Nation' is the first zombie book since 'World War Z' that kept my attention. Don't even get me started on films and television. My fellow readers who have become numb to anything zombie related, I ask that you check this out. Jane and Co.'s struggle to save themselves and others from the undead as well as other humans is a great teen read full of humor and adventure, may wake you up to the possibilities of the zombie genre again.

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